The Bogey Road

The Bogey Road is a short film, which uses archive, found and ‘orphan’ film, creating a series of vignettes that bring the archive into a sometimes uncomfortable collision with the present.

Commissioned by Safle and Caerphilly County Borough Council, the film was made in Butetown, an unfinished ‘model’ village built to house iron workers in the 1820’s, in the Upper Rhymney Valley, Caerphilly, just off the A465 Heads of the Valleys road. Using archive and found moving image material, the artist replays moments from the archival footage in locations, which resonate or jar with, the original material. This process has required the artist to work closely with local residents, filming in people’s homes as well as pubs, churches, hospitals and the Ffos-y-fran land reclamation site at Cwmbargoed.

As part of the research process, the project was accompanied by two ‘Archive Film Nights’ – community screenings of films relating to the local area, held in St Aidan’s Church in Butetown. The first of these featured materials from the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales and was accompanied by a commentary by historian Huw Williams. The second included materials contributed by local people and a screening of ‘The Silent Village‘, Humphrey Jennings seminal recreation of a Nazi atrocity in a south Wales mining community. Huw Williams again kindly provided a rich historical context for the films.